We are under attack

Submitted by charlie on Thu, Mar 19, 2015

We are under attack and we need help.

Likely in response to a recent story in the Wall Street Journal (WSJ), we’ve experienced our first ever distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack. This tactic is used to bring down web pages by flooding them with lots of requests - at the time of writing they number 2.6 billion requests per hour. Websites are not equipped to handle that kind of volume so they usually “break” and go offline.

This kind of attack is aggressive and is an exhibition of censorship by brute force. Attackers resort to tactics like this when they are left with no other options.

We are not equipped to handle a DDoS attack of this magnitude and we need help. Some background:

The attack started on March 17 and we are receiving up to 2.6 billion requests per hour which is about 2500 times more than normal levels.

This attack affects all of our mirror websites. While we have talked openly about our method of using collateral freedom to unblock websites and mobile apps that have been blocked by the Chinese authorities, the WSJ story clearly stated how the strategy works and how it is being used successfully to deliver uncensored content into China. Blocked websites that we have liberated in China include Boxun, Deutsche Welle and Google.

We don’t know who is behind this attack. However, the attack coincides with increased pressure on our organization over the last few months. The Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) publicly called us “an anti-China website set up by an overseas anti-China organization”. We also know that CAC has put pressure on our IT partners to stop working with us. Recently, we noticed that somebody was trying to impersonate us to intercept our encrypted email.

Because of the number of requests we are receiving, our bandwidth costs have shot up to USD $30,000 per day. Amazon, which is the service we are using, has not yet confirmed whether they will forgo this. If they do not forgo this, this will put a significant squeeze on our operations.

We need companies like Amazon to be on our side and, more importantly, on the side of freedom of speech. We need you to tell Amazon that you think that freedom of speech is an important issue and that Amazon, as a leading global enabler of the internet, plays an important role in access to information.

We’ve upgraded to faster servers and used other techniques to manage the load and it’s working for now but we fear that the attack may be intensified at any time. We need help to manage this. If you have expertise in this area, please contact Charlie Smith or ping us via Twitter.

Tue, May 23, 2017

Last week Twitter came under attack from a DDoS attack orchestrated by the Chinese authorities. While such attacks are not uncommon for websites like Twitter, this one proved unusual. While the Chinese authorities use the Great Firewall to block harmful content from reaching its citizens, it now uses DDoS attacks to take down content that appears on websites beyond its borders. For the Chinese authorities, it is not simply good enough to “protect” the interests of Chinese citizens at home - in their view of cyber sovereignty, any content that might harm China’s interests must be removed, regardless of where the website is located.

And so last week the Chinese authorities determined that Twitter was the target. In particular, the authorities targeted the Twitter account for Guo Wengui (https://twitter.com/KwokMiles), the rebel billionaire who is slowly leaking information about corrupt Chinese government officials via his Twitter account and through his YouTube videos. Guo appeared to ramp up his whistle-blowing efforts last week and the Chinese authorities, in turn, ramped up theirs.

Mon, Dec 12, 2016

It’s been three years since Eric Schmidt proclaimed that Google would chart a course to ending online censorship within ten years. Now is a great time to check on Google’s progress, reassess the landscape, benchmark Google’s efforts against others who share the same goal, postulate on the China strategy and offer suggestions on how they might effectively move forward.

Flowers left outside Google China’s headquarters after its announcement it might leave the country in 2010. Photo: Wikicommons.

What has Google accomplished since November 2013?

The first thing they have accomplished is an entire rebranding of both Google (now Alphabet) and Google Ideas (now Jigsaw). Throughout this blog post, reference is made to both new and old company names.

Google has started to develop two main tools which they believe can help in the fight against censorship. Jigsaw’s DDoS protection service, Project Shield, is effectively preventing censorship-inspired DDoS attacks and recently helped to repel an attack on Brian Krebs’ blog. The service is similar to other anti-DDoS services developed by internet freedom champions and for-profit services like Cloudflare.

Thu, Nov 24, 2016

Facebook is considering launching a censorship tool that would enable the world’s biggest social network to “enter” the China market. Sadly, nobody will be surprised by anything that Mark Zuckerberg decides to do in order to enter the China market. With such low expectations, Facebook is poised to usurp Apple as China’s favorite foreign intelligence gathering partner. If the company launches in China using this strategy they will also successfully erase any bargaining power that other media organizations may hold with the Chinese authorities.

Tue, Jul 05, 2016

There is a commonly held belief in China that if you have a VPN that works then you should keep quiet about it. In terms of freedom of access to information, the problem with this approach is that access to knowledge suddenly is a secret. Today we are launching a project that we hope will destroy that model.

Our newest website, Circumvention Central (CC), aims to provide real-time information and data about circumvention solutions that work in China. Since 2011, we have been collecting data about blocked websites in China and now we will add data about the effectiveness of VPNs and other circumvention tools.

We are launching CC with four main objectives in mind.

Our first objective is to help to grow the number of Chinese who circumvent censorship restrictions in China. By sharing our information and data about these tools, we hope to show a wider audience which circumvention tools are working.

Our second objective is to improve the circumvention experience for users in China by bringing transparency to tool performance. We will measure these tools on speed (how quickly popular websites are loaded) and on stability (the extent to which popular websites load successfully).

Comments

Regarding the DDoS attack - please consider using Cloudflare as a caching layer for your website - they are good when it comes to defending against that sort of attack.

Submitted by Nick on Fri, Mar 20, 2015

+1 you should sign up to Cloudflare. Let them soak up the attack so you only pay for legit requests.

Submitted by bob on Fri, Mar 20, 2015

If you use CloudFlare you'll have to release all your current AWS public IP's and get new ones. Also AWS does give you a layer of protection but it is manual and maybe hard to maintain if the DDoS is from zombies or botnet.

Submitted by Anonymous on Fri, Mar 20, 2015

For instance, CloudFlare has a program specially for website that empower freedom speech and I think it won't cost you a penny.

Submitted by George on Fri, Mar 20, 2015

Please sign up for CloudFlare. Even at $200/month you will get significant benefits and DDoS protection, they are REALLY good!

You can get a similar effect to Cloudflare (unfortunately minus the benefit of their massive infrastructure to absorb traffic) if you install mod_evasive (Apache module) and tune your config a bit. See the DDOS section in the included link, specifically lowering your timeout and keep alive timeout. Also turn down MaxRequestWorkers if your server is spawning too many processes. With mod_evasive, specify the DOSSystemCommand to ban the address using your firewall, for example, with iptables something like:
iptables -A INPUT -s %s -j REJECT
mod_evasive will substitute the %s for the source IP.

consider moving your hosting to ovh or online since they do not limit you on traffic. and they are cheap. and they offer the best ddos protection there is!

Submitted by old hack on Mon, Mar 23, 2015

You may consider explaining to amazon that you are under attack and want the traffic dropped upstream.
Amazon should be able to do better than letting the host application absorb the requests (If they can not, I am rather disapointed).

Kim John Coon's suggestion above to try and identify and filter the abusive traffic with iptables will help take the load off your server.

Submitted by Anonymous on Wed, Apr 01, 2015

安装360的用户普遍感觉电脑变慢，天下有免费午餐吗，360有可能利用用户电脑进行云计算或者ddos攻击

Submitted by old hack on Thu, Apr 16, 2015

I see that the effected services have been blocked to those outside mainland China. Good move to counter this attack, well done.

Submitted by Alyssa thomas on Sun, Apr 26, 2015

Time to start naming names.
The president of China is Xi Jinping and everyone should know his name. Nothing in China happens without his consent.

Just get a firewall. Cisco if it's that bad. Or just use a dedicated ESF server for you're public ip and you'll be protected and it's got a very fast learning curve. We've been fending of attacks every minute from around the world with ESF. You'd be surprised how good this FW is and you don't even need a license.

blocking, dns fudged to show fake errors, searchines and those widgest they have on so many other websies suddenle become full of outright malicious code .. and that gets worse and worse, even the operating systems (all of them) spit out fake error messages ... some stuff like that even in linux source code .. all operating syste, agffected and the symptoms are the same .. files mysteruiously get deleted (even text files and code), sites get blocked and things reguce to cionnect to local networks unless that is connected to to the outside .. everything suddenly wanting centralised "cloud" logins, and a lot of nasty code snuck into operating syustem updates .. seems like in the last month or so its suddenly malware everywhere on EVERY OS ..
and try searching for a clan install iso of anything and you are quickly under attack from just about everything out there ... ... seems like not just one corrupt corporation but a consortium of the most corrupt corporations on earth and ALL of it seems to be trying to bully people into handing over admin of their OWN pc to unknown third parties i"in the cloud"

THERE IS NO WAY IN HELL I AM GOING TO TRUST SUCH OBVIOUSLY CORRUPT COMPANIES AND NO WAY IN HELL I WOULD TRUST SOMEONE TRYING TO FORCE ME TO TRUST THEM..

"management" stops at the front router .. that the way it will STAY ..

do not EVER give in to those creeps - DO NOT BUY THEIR STUFF - make sure everyone knows

yes it IS getting into OS updates ..
in open source systems have a look! .. thetre are error messages designed to MISLEAD the users - obviously something malicious got in .. and where theres no siource code the effect is the same top - its in EVERYTHING that was updated over the last couple of months.

now the government here even officially passed a bill to fo censorship! .. and its happening all over the world .. same stuff about "metadata retention" .. and they talkk about usage data.. NO - its obiously a LOY more than that if they are putting code on every user pc, deleting their data witrhour warning, and even the error meressages lie and every attempt to get rid of it by trying to find a frees clean distro iso met with attack after attack .. javsript everwhere not just tracking bout way more malicious .. attacks from every direction .. never seen anything this bad... and anty info seems impossible to find ..
censorship everywhere

never would have thought it woyuld become like that over here.. but looks like the same talk from politicians, the same trolling and sloganising from corporations

probably not hard to giess what went on atr those secretive "trade talks"

this looks like planet scale totalitarism .. corruuption fgone mad ..

isd there anything left that is safe? .. how will anyone be abloe to da anyithing if you don;t know id that file will get deleted just after you save it!!!!

and its obviously for censorship , not "copyright" or any other broken nonsense .. whate else could it be if text files and code set it off even more than music or video and it doesn't seem to care whether you made it.

seems like its the worse malweare ever seen coming from every directopm at the same tind along with it a lot of suspicious trolling and "social engineering"

it looks like a consortium f the most corrupt corporations on earth have been changing the law in every counltry precendent by precedent over the last decade and syicking their dirrty fingers into everything.. not it sems the have a leash on nearly every government and their security agencies .. the most corrupt corporations on earth - and those obvously stacked meetings of so called "standards bodies" in recent years .. yes they are even hijacking network protocols...

.. probably not hard now to guess what went on in those secretive talks .. with all that happening since then

no MANAGEMENT STOPS AT THE FRONT DOOR AND THERE IS NO WAY IN HELL I WILL LET THEM GO ANY FURTHER.

what sort of idiot would want to trust lowlife like that with anything?

by now they should know what I think if their "cloud" bullshit!

no .. no way
I would want let third party "management" run by people so corrupt near any box let alone break things, delete data and try to destry my life! .... I will fight in anyt way I can to keep those
creeps out.

it might help if there was a still a way to communicate with anyone without anything important or even slightly interesting disappearing .. but nonetheless they are not getting in my jouse .., I never wanted to be anyones enemy and won;t be selling out to their ways and hurtunbg anyone .. but I sure as hell won;t lert them control anything here!

so angry I can barely type...

don;'t want to even think about what other people might do .,.

no i despite how bad the furureits looking I just won;t put up with it ..
btrining that inot my house makes it *personal* and we must make sure EVERY company or person who helped them attack us NEVER EVER gets a cent out of ANYONE

yes - Im angry..

intersing though - if this were a file on my h
no i despite how bad the furureits looking I just won;t put up with it ..
btrining that inot my house makes it *personal* and we must make sure EVERY company or person who helped them attack us NEVER EVER gets a cent out of ANYONE

yes - I'm angry..

and don't wan't any "management" crap destroying my life .

and I never try to hurt anyone.. I'm actually still human, unlike those creeps

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